Orchestral tour de force

There is only one test that a performance of Verdi’s Otello has to pass: do you come out of the theatre drained, desperate at the suffering that human beings who love one another can nonetheless inflict, so that they torture or even kill the object of their love? Shakespeare’s play is about other things besides, indeed that may not be the major test of a production of it. But Verdi and his librettist Boito took a straightforward view of what is Shakespeare’s longest and one of his most complex plays, so that what they give us is what Leavis called ‘the sentimentalist’s Othello’, in which, taking the Moor at his own valuation, we are asked to sympathise with a character who is so guileless that he believes anything that anyone tells him — unless it is his love object who tells him, in which case he thinks that she is trying to deceive him.